Boosting the signal

[hapaxnym]

This is an amazing observation, and it is one of the best justifications for the current trend for dystopian YA fiction, and one of the harshest condemnations of our society's treatment of QUILTBAG people, that I've ever seen.

Money quote: 
It's actually difficult to think of many dystopian novels that persecute their protagonists to this extent. And

Comments

[takumashii]

There's something very appealing to me in that. I had a very insulated childhood and when I was twelve or thirteen and first finding out about gay people and culture-war stuff, my instincts were to that sort of romantic anti-authoritarian outrage at The Man screwing with people's love affairs. But, I don't know. If you take some of these books where the very existence of gay people seems to throw a wrench into the system, then the metaphorical possibilities seem to be dwarfed by the erasure. Kind of like those science fiction stories that use aliens to talk about racial prejudice but don't actually have any people of color in them.